11 May, 2017

False beliefs and the war on Venezuela

Western
media coverage of this latest coup attempt by Venezuela’s
right-wing opposition has tried to establish false beliefs

by
Tortilla con Sal

A basic
reality underlies the self-evident role of Western media as
theirruling elites’ cultural and psychological warfare arm against
both their own peoples and the peoples of the majority world. The
Western power elites can no longer freely externalize the costs of
their countries’ prosperity and democracy onto the majority world.
They have always defended their global power and control of global
resources through military and economic aggression overseas. Now they
are intensifying repression of civil and economic rights at home. In
that global context, psychological warfare takes on disproportionate
importance as a means to promote acceptance among whole populations
of overseas military aggression and domestic curtailment of civil and
economic rights. Over the last fifty years, military developments of
psychology and social science have gone from “brainwashing” and
“perception management”, through what used to be called
low-intensity warfare to what many people call fourth generation
warfare. Since World War 2, the United States and allied country film
and television industries have been fundamental components of Western
cultural and psychological warfare. Internet monopolies like Google
and Facebook have multiplied the power and reach of Western cultural
mass reproduction many times over. The elites managing these
corporations control the supply and demand of messages on an
international industrial scale. Together with their governments’
global surveillance and intelligence apparatus, they also shape how
those messages are consumed. This concentration and control of
intellectual production and cultural reproduction ensures a permanent
flow of information endlessly asserting and reaffirming the views and
values of the imperialist Western ruling elites and their
governments. Their constant global cultural and psychological warfare
has developed to the point where it operates via infinite feedback
loops needing virtually no intervention.

Effectively,
by means of relentless suggestion, fake corroboration, and systematic
omission, the West’s system of disinformation and intellectual
production constructs collective false memories. Over time,
relentless cultural propaganda and psychological warfare manipulate
people’s imaginations building false memories and beliefs immune to
rational analysis. Over decades, this process establishes a received
wisdom that ratifies and entrenches a set of false beliefs whose
effect no amount of factual debunking and exposure can erase. The
clearest example of this is how exposure to U.S. and British
government lies about Iraq has made no difference. The Western elites
and their psychological warfare machinery simply move on to create
the next big lie, always using the same techniques: relentless
suggestion, fake corroboration, and systematic omission.

In relation
to North Korea, for example, the big omission is that North Korea is
and has been the victim of permanent military threat by the United
States, involving the regular mobilization on its borders of hundreds
of thousands of U.S. and allied military personnel and the threat of
nuclear attack, ever since the Korean War. In the case of Iran, the
big omission is that revolutionary Iran has been a force for
relatively progressive change in the region since 1979, challenging
Western-allied feudal tyrannies and Israel’s genocidal occupation
of Palestine. For nearly 60 years the big omission in the coverage of
Cuba’s revolution has been the success against all odds of its
political system and its huge social, scientific and cultural
achievements recognized and admired around the world despite the
permanent illegal U.S. blockade.

The false
validity of the black and white silhouette monsters created by these
systematic omissions gets corroboration via well-worn infinite
feedback loops. For example, in Latin America, the regional right
wing will circulate a given falsehood which is then repeated as true
by the Western news and entertainment media. The regional right wing
then takes Western repetition of their falsehood as vindication of
its truth which is then recycled in its turn. In Latin America, since
the turn of the century, Venezuela has been the most high-profile
victim. But all the region’s progressive governments and political
movements have been similarly targeted to a greater or lesser degree.
Fundamentally, everything is aimed at manipulating and shaping
people’s imaginations and memories, both within the region and
beyond.

Right now,
the regional battle referred to on May 5 by Lula da Silva and Pepe
Mujica at a rally in São Paulo is playing out intensely and
literally in Venezuela. Western media coverage of this latest coup
attempt by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition has tried to
establish false beliefs such as:

President
Nicolas Maduro is a dictator (whereas Nicolas Maduro is the
legitimately elected President of the government working together
with four other separate powers of State)

President
Maduro used the Supreme Court to eliminate the legislature (in fact
President Maduro convened the National Security Council of State
which secured the reversal of the Supreme Court’s ruling affecting
the National Assembly)

the
opposition has overwhelming popular support (but surveys show most
people in Venezuela reject opposition violence and the opposition’s
political program)

the
government is provoking violence by attacking peaceful demonstrators
(precisely the reverse is true)

people
killed and injured in the violence are victims of State violence
(almost all the people killed and injured have been victims of
opposition attacks)

convoking
the National Constituent Assembly is a coup d’etat (in fact it
enables Venezuelan people at grass roots to decide their country’s
future)

the National
Constituent Assembly is rigged in favor of the government (but if the
opposition is as representative as they say then it gives them the
chance to take power legitimately)

Despite
being clearly untrue, all these falsehoods have been reported as true
while the contradictory reality has been suppressed. One infamous
example of this process figured in Western reports of the opposition
attack on the maternity hospital in the El Valle district of Caracas
on Apr. 20. Reports in leading Western news media outlets played down
the terrorist nature of this attack and in one case even tried
falsely to attribute the evacuation of the hospital to the use of
tear gas by the police. Western coverage of that outrage resembled
all too closely similar coverage of the Odessa massacre of May 2,
2014 in Ukraine, when police stood by while Nazi gangs set fire to a
trades union building killing 42 people. In both cases, the most
prestigious liberal Western media failed to report truthfully the
aggression of fascist terror gangs.

Right now
the priority for everyone who supports progressive change in Latin
America and the Caribbean is to support all efforts at a peaceful
settlement of the crisis in Venezuela. President Maduro’s call for
a National Constituent Assembly represents the best hope for a
peaceful outcome. That is precisely why the U.S. government, Luis
Almagro and his team at the OAS, and right wing leaders from Mexico’s
President Peña Nieto to Argentina’s Mauricio Macri want it to
fail. The regional right wing know that, without duress, a majority
of people in Venezuela will vote to defend peace and stability and
the legacy of Comandante Hugo Chávez. For the moment the outcome is
very much in the balance. The only thing for sure is that Western
media will continue to suppress the facts and justify the terrorist
violence of Venezuela’s minority opposition.